Wild West on the Waterfront

SEA LEVEL RISE: 2nd in a Series

WILD WEST ON THE WATERFRONT

As developers challenge state environmental rules, local leaders push to build more projects

In summer 2015, the Public Press first reported on how rising seas could inundate coastal land in the Bay Area. Since then, we have discovered that state regulation of waterfront development has loosened, while local governments have been slow to respond.

The landmark California Environmental Quality Act, which cities have used compel adaptation to climate change, has been weakened by legal challenges from the powerful building industry. In San Francisco, as elsewhere, officials continue to promote large developments on the bay despite scientists' increasingly dire scenarios as greenhouse-gas emissions melt the world's glaciers and spawn powerful storms.

To gauge how interpretation of state law is changing, we searched public databases of construction projects, reviewed dozens of lawsuits and court cases, and analyzed thousands of pages of environmental records filed with planning agencies. A public records request also revealed efforts by developers and builders to lobby Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration to dissuade cities from invoking the state’s environmental law to address climate change. We also used public records requests to determine why a major city-commissioned report on flood risk in Mission Bay was not published before officials and voters signed off on the San Francisco Giants' Mission Rock development and the Golden State Warriors new arena.

Two years ago, the California Supreme Court overturned decades of land-use law by upholding lower court rulings that cities could no longer require developers to take into account the effects of climate change on their projects. That decision has unsettled public officials and planners, and critics say it will allow real estate interests to saddle taxpayers with a gigantic bill to defend against rising seas.

Invoking recent court decisions, developers are pushing back on the ability of Bay Area cities to use the California Environmental Quality Act to regulate waterfront development and protect residents from rising sea levels.

A city-commissioned environmental study that detailed how the Mission Bay neighborhood would be inundated by rising seas in coming decades went unpublished for more than a year while two showcase waterfront developments won key approvals from city officials and voters, a Public Press review of records shows

Officials offer explanations for 18-month delay in releasing city-funded study that foresees serious climate-related flooding in Mission Bay in the decades ahead. The release followed a public-records request by the Public Press.

Although Bay Area planners have in recent years elevated the role that sea level rise projections play in the permitting and design process, cities are still under pressure to approve more development quickly on under-used land.

Across California, policymakers and urban planners at every level of government are struggling with how to respond to new computer models that show massive ice sheets in Antarctica on the brink of collapse.

The changing climate and shifting weather patterns are affecting each region of the globe differently, and not all coastal cities will experience sea level rise in the same manner. Likewise, there will not be a single most effective adaptation strategy, but many.

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